


The Lonely God

by winterune



Series: Natsume Week 2019 [6]
Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Adventure, Gen, Supernatural Elements, Tumblr: Natsume Week, Tumblr: Natsume Week 2019, Youkai, more youkai troubles for natsume
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-23 07:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23908168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterune/pseuds/winterune
Summary: Natsume goes on a field trip and one night, they're holding a test of courage in the forests and hills behind their inn, which the locals say are teeming with ghosts. For someone who's dealt with youkai all his life, walking down the dark narrow moonlit path up the hill by himself still doesn't stop the shivers from going down his spine
Relationships: Madara "Nyanko-sensei" & Natsume Takashi
Series: Natsume Week 2019 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1409632
Comments: 2
Kudos: 53





	The Lonely God

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr, this was my entry for the natsumeweek 2019 event on tumblr  
> Day 6 Prompt: Gods/Magic
> 
> Planned to give it another read and maybe a round of edit or two before I post it here, but what the heck. It's been almost a year since I wrote this and I don't think there are any huge changes I wanted to make ~~except probably making it flow better and edit some word choices~~
> 
> Anyway, here's another Natsume meeting his grandmother fic. I love writing about the two of them!
> 
> I hope you enjoy :)

The forest and hill behind the inn they were staying for the field trip was said to house a lot of ghosts. It was said that hundreds of years ago, a powerful, malevolent being was sealed in those hills and its contempt still remained until today. Incidents had been happening over the years that always ended up with missing people or someone turning up dead. Or, at least, that was what the locals said. Natsume didn’t know how much truth the story carried. Still, despite having dealt with youkai most of his life, walking down the dark narrow moonlit path up the hill by himself sent shivers down his spine and goosebumps raising throughout his arms. Thanks to the locals for telling him all these ghost stories.

Why did they have to walk alone? They should have gone two at a time. They really shouldn’t have let Sasada be in charge with this thing.

A rustle on the bushes on his right side made him jump.

A huge head suddenly appeared and Natsume screamed.

“Can you be any louder?!” a voice he knew too well spoke up.

“Sensei?”

Natsume squinted in the darkness and indeed, he could see the black and orange pattern on the cat’s head. Nyanko-sensei jumped through the bushes and shook his body free of leaves and debris when he landed on the path beside Natsume. Natsume sighed through his nose.

“You didn’t have to scare me like that!” he said indignantly.

“Your fault for having a faint heart,” Sensei retorted. The cat turned around and headed up the hill. “Come on, let’s hurry up and finish this. There’s this manju shop I saw down the street and I want you to buy me some.”

Natsume scowled, but he had no other choice but to follow.

Shortly afterwards, they came upon a split in the path.

“Funny,” Natsume mused. “I don’t recall Sasada mentioning this.”

Nyanko-sensei was looking to the right, then left. He lifted his head higher and sniffed the air. “This way,” Sensei said, already marching down the right path.

“Hey, wait!” Natsume called him over. “Come on, Sensei, don’t go off on your own or I won’t buy you any manju!”

That stopped Nyanko-sensei in his tracks. He looked over at Natsume and glared at him. Natsume grinned at him.

Down the right path, Natsume followed his guardian’s lead, until they came upon another split. Nyanko-sensei chose the right path again. On their third encounter with the split, the cat was grumbling and muttering under his breath and Natsume started feeling something was not right. When they came across yet another split in the path, Nyanko-sensei screamed in frustration.

“OK, who’s doing this?” he shouted to no one in particular. He glared up the left path, as though he could see something in the dark.

“What’s wrong, Sensei?” Natsume asked.

Sensei clicked his tongue irritably. “Haven’t you noticed? We’ve been walking in a loop! Someone wants us to go up there,” he said, nodding up the other path.

Natsume had had a feeling there was something wrong with the left path. Something eerie and sinister. It was as though the air itself trembled. He had tried not to look directly there, but now that Nyanko-sensei had pointed it out, Natsume readied himself to face the left path.

Indeed, the path was so dark Natsume couldn’t see anything beyond the trees and leaves. It was as though the trees themselves were trying to hide whatever they were hiding inside.

_Ghosts_ , came Natsume’s thoughts, along with all the stories he had heard from the locals.

“Maybe we should check it out, Sensei,” Natsume said.

Nyanko-sensei glanced at him and Natsume knew that glance. It was that glance that told him he was doing too much again, but there was nothing they could do. If they want to leave the loop, it seemed the only way was to go up the left path, deeper and higher into the hills.

“We won’t be able to get those manju if we can’t leave the loop,” Natsume said, using the one leverage he knew would persuade the cat-guardian. Nyanko-sensei narrowed his eyes, his scowl deepening, but knew he couldn’t refuse.

“Come on!” he said in resign. “The faster we get this done, the faster I can eat those manju.”

So Natsume and Nyanko-sensei went up the left path. The path felt different the moment Natsume stepped into it—denser, narrower, and more suffocating. It went up the hillside and with every step, Natsume felt his feet become heavier.

After a while, the trees ended and the forest opened up to a moonlit clearing with a red _torii_ gate at the center and a small shrine beyond beneath a huge tree. The thick atmosphere seemed to be swirling around the shrine.

“Is that where the youkai is sealed?” Natsume asked warily.

“Seems like it,” Nyanko-sensei replied. In a poof, the cat transformed into a great white beast, and Madara growled at the shrine. “Let’s get this over and done with, Natsume,” he said. “You break the seal, I’ll banish it.”

Natsume nodded. Holding the waist bag that contained the Book of Friends tightly, Natsume walked up toward the gate. But he noticed it too late: the sudden stillness in the air, the slight change of wind, the rush of black shapeless mass, and Madara screaming his name. He looked back, right as the sinister smile of a faceless man appeared before him and his feet had taken him through the gate’s threshold. Then everything vanished.

*******

When Natsume opened his eyes, he was on the other side of the gate and the sky was bright and blue and cloudless. In the far distance, he could see black birds soaring high. It was warm, unlike how the place had been just moments before.

Natsume’s attention was drawn to the voices behind him and he saw the small shrine on top of a huge rock and a girl his age crouching before it. She wore a school uniform he recognized, dusty-blonde hair hanging down to her bust. The girl was laughing and Natsume knew who she was.

“Reiko-san,” he said without thinking.

The girl’s laugh stopped abruptly and she looked over her shoulder. Their eyes met and Natsume closed his mouth in surprise, eyes widening and blinking several times.

She could see him?! Let alone hear him!

Reiko cocked her head to the side. “Who are you?” she asked. When Natsume didn’t answer, Reiko stood up and brushed the dirt from her skirt. “How’d you get here? Are you lost?”

Natsume opened his mouth, but no word came out. How could this happen? How could Reiko see him? Even if some youkai magic were involved, usually, he could only enter a memory, not be present inside the memory itself.

“You can see me.” A statement, not a question, and from the frown and the slight crease on her forehead, Natsume knew that was not what he was supposed to say.

Reiko looked back at the shrine and Natsume could see the same old shrine ornaments there. Except, there was a man standing underneath the tree foliage just behind the shrine. A man with jet-black hair, kind eyes and a warm smile, wearing a worn-out yukata.

“I know you can manipulate the time, but what is this?” Reiko asked the man. She looked at Natsume again and there was a small smile on her face—a mixture of astonishment and displeasure. “A male version of myself from an alternate universe?”

Reiko couldn’t help but laugh but Natsume still couldn’t process what was happening.

_Someone who could manipulate the time_.

When Natsume looked at the man, he found the man was staring back, and for an instant, the faceless man and his smile flashed in his mind.

_Is that the youkai?_ Natsume thought.

Reiko approached him and peered up into his face. Natsume realized that he was taller than his grandmother had been at his age. The same hair color, similar eyes. No wonder the youkai often mistook him for her.

Reiko held her fingers out to his cheek and Natsume felt the warmth in her touch. His eyes widened. This was real. This wasn’t just some flashback. He wasn’t just some apparition. He was physically _here_ , wherever and whenever ‘here’ was.

Was he dead? Or did he just travel back in time?! The former seemed more plausible but he didn’t feel dead at all.

“And you made him look so real too,” Reiko mused, still not knowing it was her own future grandson who was standing right before her. “For a God with not enough power left, you did well with this one.”

Natsume’s eyes shifted again to the man in the yukata and the smile on his face full of resignation. Reiko didn’t say anything else but thank the man for his time and his name before leaving the shrine and passing through the gate down the hill. Natsume watched as the youkai kept a close eye on Reiko’s receding back before he turned his full attention on Natsume.

“As you’ve heard, I am the God of this small shrine,” he said.

“You’re not a youkai, then?”

The man sighed, the small smile never leaving his face. “At times, I do wonder about that,” he replied. “Whether I’m still the God I used to be, or if I’ve become too much of an ayakashi.”

“What happened?” Natsume asked.

“Nothing entirely special,” the God said. “I used to have a lot of shrines scattered throughout Japan, but fewer and fewer people worship me. Now, I only have this small shrine to call as my home and with no one to come for me, my powers start to diminish. I won’t be able to hold back the negative energy that has been rampant in these parts for long.”

“That’s when Reiko came along.” The God smiled. “You could say that her presence brightened my day. She gave me enough strength to fight off the dark energy for a while longer.”

It dawned on Natsume then what had happened to the God, and why he was led to come to the shrine.

“I have probably lost my mind to the evil in the area,” the God said and Natsume couldn’t bring himself to nod. But the God understood nonetheless and he nodded, his movement heavy as though he was suddenly wearied.

“My powers allow me to see the past, present, and future, and I see that Reiko has died in your time,” the God went on quietly. A short pause, and Natsume swore he could see the God’s shoulders shake imperceptibly. When he looked up and met Natsume’s gaze, his eyebrows were drawn and his smile was thin. “Will you return my name to me? It’ll give me enough power to fend off the evil energy.”

Natsume nodded, even though he knew the God didn’t really want his name back. But there was nothing else he could do. The God looked fine in front of him, but this was some forty to fifty years ago. The God in his own time didn’t look as warm nor kind as this.

“Thank you, Natsume,” the God said. “I will return you to your time now.”

The God closed his eyes and Natsume felt warm breeze all around him, pushing at him, cocooning him, and when Natsume opened his eyes again, he was back in the shrine, at night time, the malicious energy overwhelming him. Noticing Natsume finally back to his senses, Madara growled his name under his breath as he pinned the black, shapeless mass under him.

Taking a closer look, Natsume could just make out the face and the jet-black hair. The kind eyes had disappeared, the warm smile replaced by a sinister sneer.

“ _Natsume!_ ” Madara growled again.

This was not a sealed youkai going rampant. This was a God being overtaken by the evil energy in this mountain, and he had lived here protecting the mountain and its surrounding. Natsume grabbed the Book of Friends from his waist bag and performed the ritual.

The book flipped open to a page and Natsume whispered the God’s name, sending the black letters back into the mindless God. The black mass screamed and at once, Natsume was brought back into that bright clearing in the cloudless day, where Reiko challenged the God into a rock-paper-scissor match.

“I’ll still come here every day,” Reiko said, when Reiko won and the God wrote his name on a piece of paper.

The God smiled, though he knew Reiko would never come visit again.

Natsume opened his eyes and found himself lying on the grass. He stayed there for a couple more moments, staring at the star-strewn sky, and was it just him or did the sky look slightly brighter than it had moments before? The air felt lighter and the clearing seemed wider.

Nyanko-sensei appeared in his line of sight.

“You’re awake, Natsume?” the cat asked.

Natsume sat up and looked around. The clearing was empty except for both of them—the God nowhere in sight.

“He already left,” Nyanko-sensei said. Natsume looked at the cat beside him. “The moment you returned his name, his mind came back. But he didn’t have that much power left to begin with, so his name only gave him enough power to protect the whole mountain from the dark energy.”

“He’s gone?” Natsume asked.

Nyanko-sensei shrugged. “Who knows? He could be off somewhere taking a nice long break for all I care. Anyway, Natsume!”—Nyanko-sensei went up to his face—“You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

When Natsume cocked his head to the side, Nyanko-sensei scowled. “Manju! Man-ju! Come on! Let’s hurry before the store closes up!”

Natsume couldn’t help the chuckle as he watched the cat-guardian stalked away out of the clearing. Natsume took one last look at the shrine. He offered a silent prayer and murmured a _goodbye_ before he followed Nyanko-sensei out of the clearing.

**~ END ~**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it :D Please leave a comment or two if you like. I'd love to know what you think. Thanks!


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